NAV Portugal chooses the smartGlobe Aeronautical Charting System

NAV Portugal's mission

NAV Portugal is the Portuguese air navigation services provider to both Portuguese FIR’s: Lisboa and Santa Maria. NAV Portugal’s mission is to plan, guide and to control the air traffic in accordance to the international and national regulation, applying the highest standards of safety, optimising capacities, and enhancing efficiency, always taking in account environmental concerns.

The Transition and Migration Plan of AIS products towards EAD (European AIS Database), concerning NOTAM production, Static Database (Static Data Operation), Published AIP Management System (PAMS) and AIP Production was concluded in July 2003. For several reasons, it was impossible to include in the same package, the migration of AIP Charts towards EAD, as initially planned, adding some consequences to the quality of the service provision.

Read more

We now have a robust Charting tool which uses the static data from the EAD SDO. This way it can always be assured that all charts and the AIP textual parts use the same data. The software is very efficient and allows us to produce chart products more quickly with improved quality.

Luis Santos

Chart Team Coordinator (AIS/MAP) - AIS Department, NAV Portugal

NAV Portugal chooses smartGlobe because it offers:

Integrated platform

An integrated CAD/GIS platform which allows for construction of a chart in a projected environment. Ensuring the consistency and integrity of the aeronautical data published in the AIP.

Single source

A single source of static data for all charts (Static Data Operation – SDO).

Temporal Database

A temporal Database which provides a seamless history of static data.

Data Standards

Support for the Data Standards ARINC 424 and AIXM.

Compatibility

It runs on Commercial-Off-The-Shelf hardware and software.

Compliant

A truly integrated workflow

In 2006 NAV Portugal finally had the optimum environment to integrate the charts into the AIS department, making as a main objective to have all the tools for an efficient and integrated AIS operation: Static Data Management, International NOTAM Operations, AIP and Chart production, and Pre-Flight Information Briefing. To achieve this goal one important consideration was the fact that EAD offers a truly integrated workflow as all systems use the same data source.

Professional chart production platform

“The EAD Chart Production system based on the smartGlobe Aeronautical Charting System provides NAV Portugal with a professional and modern chart production platform that is fully integrated with the EAD Static Data Operation” says Luis Santos, Chart Team Coordinator (AIS/MAP) in the Aeronautical Information Services (AIS) Department, NAV Portugal.“

The ECIT Chart Production is designed to be a productivity tool: rather than having to deal with data entry, data preparation and configuration, our charting officer’s can concentrate on the creation of the charts themselves, “” says Luis. “Many tasks have been automated, such as grid/graticule creation, retrieval of static data, symbolization and annotation. Clean up tasks are supported by specialized tool boxes. Once a chart has been created it can be automatically updated by applying another effective date to the chart.”

An open system

Another advantage for NAV Portugal was that the EAD Chart Production system is an open system, allowing for the import and export of most common bitmap and vector data formats which meant that their existing charts could be easily migrated to the EAD Chart Production system.

“”If SDO data isn’t available for procedures we can use the integrated Calculation tools in smartGlobe to calculate accurate intersections, tracks and distances. In this way we can interactively “build” our procedures knowing that they can be replaced with the SDO procedures when these are available.”

Additionally the EAD Chart Production system comes with an ICAO Annex 4 compliant Symbol library and pre-defined chart specifications. It is also possible to define your own (non-ICAO) chart specifications if required.

Expertise Cadac Group

Contact us

About Cadac Group

In your industry, you are constantly striving for greater efficiency, especially for the complex design processes in your field of expertise. In these cases, you want to rely on the market knowledge of industry experts. With us, you can benefit from more than 30 years of experience in creating, managing, and sharing your digital design information. Our solutions link your design software to the technology for the management of the process and the sharing of documents. This makes your design process faster and more efficient.